Conventional systems for verifying the identity of persons typically involve either the use of highly skilled screening personnel at a large number of screening points, or involve the use of biometric analysis systems. The use of a large number of highly skilled screening personnel that compare photographic identification documents or cards with the face of the person whose identification is being verified is difficult and expensive to implement since each screener must be highly skilled in complex personal identification techniques. The use of poorly trained screening personnel presents a dangerous false sense of security. Moreover, even with highly skilled screeners, inconsistencies between procedures used by different screeners may present further difficulties.
The use of biometric analyses standardizes and automates much of the process, but applications using biometric analyses suffer from shortcomings as well. For example, many biometric analysis systems require some human interpretation of the data to be certain of the identity in a high percentage of cases, and this interpretation may vary. Moreover, the process of obtaining reliable and consistent biometric information from a large number of persons to be identified remains difficult and expensive due to biometric data capturing concerns, particularly with non-contact biometric data capturing. Certain conventional non-contact biometric data capturing systems use video cameras to capture the faces of people in a subject area, or employ non-contact sensors to capture characteristics of parts of a person's body. Such systems, however, remain inconsistent and insufficiently reliable, at least in part due to variations in how the subject is presented to the video camera or sensor. For facial recognition, poor or changing lighting and poor pose angles present significant difficulties. Difficulties are also presented by having a moving subject with a fixed camera view area, particularly if the subject's face occupies a small portion of a large and highly varying view area. Other non-contact biometric techniques include iris scanning, which requires that each subject walk up to a capture device, align themselves correctly and have their iris scanned and verified. Contact based biometric systems, such as finger print readers, are generally considered to be less safe from a health standpoint due to having a large number of persons touch the same device over a long period of time. Contact based biometric verifications also take longer to complete than non-contact based, by the very nature of the interaction between the sensor and the person being verified.
For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,119,096 discloses a system and method for automated aircraft boarding that employs iris recognition. The system, however, requires that each passenger be initially enrolled and scanned into the system. U.S. Pat. No. 6,018,739 discloses a distributed biometric personal identification system that uses fingerprint and photographic data to identify individuals. The system is disclosed to capture biometric data at workstations and to send it to a centralized server via a wide area telecommunications network for automated processing. Similarly, U.S. Pat. No. 6,317,544 discloses a distributed mobile biometric identification system with a centralized server and mobile workstations that uses fingerprint and photographic data to identify individuals. The system is disclosed to capture biometric data at workstations and to send it to a centralized server via a wireless network for automated processing. Each of these systems, however, may produce false positive identifications (which may overwhelm a review system), may not verify those who are who they say they are or miss certain identifications due to uncertainties in biometric data capture and/or analysis as discussed above.
There is a need, therefore, for an efficient and economical system and method that provides improved personal identity verification for a large number of persons in a high volume environment.